I reviewed Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs for Dallas Morning News. Here’s how the review begins:

The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud

(Knopf, $25.95)

Nora Eldridge, a woman scalded by the fallout from an unusual relationship, narrates Claire Messud’s bracing fifth novel, The Woman Upstairs. Nora details the events that wounded her in retrospect, serving them with a mix of vivid anger, self-loathing and genuine appreciation for the objects of her affection that led to her unusual seduction and disgrace.

Nora reflects, “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.” Nora wanted to have children and create stirring art, but instead at 37 she’s a childless schoolteacher, and when she meets Sirena Shahid, an up-and-coming Paris-based Italian artist, mother of Nora’s enchanting student Reza, Nora is particularly vulnerable to her charms.

The Woman Upstairs is not so much the story of the road not taken as it is that of the longed-for road that never appeared. Some of the blame for this lies in a lack of luck that found Nora at 30 still struggling to become an artist, and soon after spending years caring for her dying mother — but some fault lies in Nora’s restraint, her tendency to cleave to the practical, and her inability to pursue her passions at full tilt.

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I reviewed a new documentary, Out of Print, that examines how the rise of digital reading is changing the book industry, libraries, and even our brains, for PBS MediaShift.

‘Out of Print’ Doc Examines the End of Print Books and What it Portends

People have used books as a reliable tool to transmit and preserve information, ideas, and stories for hundreds of years. E-books have enjoyed wide use for only about six years — counting from when Amazon introduced its Kindle in 2007. Yet e-books have rapidly upended so many facets of the traditional book world that the changes they’ve caused have inspired a documentary, “Out of Print,” by director Vivienne Roumani, which debuted April 25 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Through interviews with historians specializing in the history of books, as well as key figures in publishing, libraries, schools, bookselling, and cognitive science, and by presenting statistics culled from recent literacy surveys, “Out of Print” presents a portrait of a literary landscape in the midst of rapid change, both positive and negative. The advent of e-books has made reading more efficient and affordable for many and has increased access to and acceptance of self-publishing.

But on the other hand, “Out of Print” portrays young people who are unable or unwilling to read long sections of text, and can’t retain or synthesize the snippets of information they skim. “A book is something I’m being forced to read, so I spend my time thinking about how I’d rather be sleeping,” says one teenage boy in the film.

Another teenager describes the bewildering experience of visiting a library to conduct research. Although he may be hamming it up for his fellow interviewees, he describes it as “probably one of the hardest experiences of my life. There were so many books, each book specific to one thing. It’s not like you could find one book with everything that you needed in it. I was like, ‘this is terrible. I just want to Google it.’”

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http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/04/out-of-print-doc-examines-the-end-of-print-books-and-what-it-portends119.html

I reviewed Sam Lipsyte’s new story collection for Dallas Morning News. I liked it a lot better than his most recent novel, The Ask, because he seemed to care about the characters more in the stories. Here’s the beginning of my review:

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http://dallasne.ws/15hJQlv

A month ago, Amazon obtained a patent that would make it possible for people to sell used e-books and other digital content. I spoke to two prominent authors, Ayelet Waldman and John Scalzi, about what this would mean.

Here’s the beginning of the article, which ran on PBS MediaShift today:

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is out in paperback, and it’s a good one for the end of winter. Here’s a bit from my review of it in High Country News:

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I reviewed the new novel by Kent Haruf, one of my favorite writers, for Dallas Morning News. He’s reading tonight, March 7, at the Boulder Book Store.

“Benediction,” by Kent Haruf

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http://dallasne.ws/15rDfqu

I reviewed Pauls Toutonghi’s excellent Evel Knievel Days for High Country News.

A Montanan walks into a Cairo bar: A review of Evel Knievel Days

After reading two of Karen Russell’s three books, I’ve decided she’s a writer whose every book I need to read. From now on. I reviewed “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” for Dallas Morning News:

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell

(Knopf, $24.95)

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130215-book-review-vampires-in-the-lemon-grove-by-karen-russell.ece

I reviewed She Matters by Missoula-based memoirist Susanna Sonnenberg for Dallas Morning News this week. Sonnenberg is a fantastic writer, and the topic, about the female friendships that sustained her, is a worthy one, but I agreed with the New York Times book reviewer Susan Chira, who noted, “There is much to admire in this book — its imaginative narrative structure, its arresting prose, its raw honesty — but some of it is exasperating, too. I wish it had been edited more tightly, with fewer friends, each one standing more precisely for a turn in Sonnenberg’s life or a moment of revelation.”

Here’s some of what I had to say for the Dallas Morning News:

She Matters

A Life in Friendships

Susanna Sonnenberg

(Scribner, $24)

Susanna Sonnenberg’s 2008 memoir Her Last Death detailed her Manhattan childhood with an extravagant, inappropriate and singularly crazy mother who followed “cocaine-fierce days” with “sluggish comas on the bed.”

She escaped her mother’s orbit, moving to Missoula to marry, work and raise two sons. In She Matters: A Life in Friendships, Sonnenberg chronicles the female friendships that sustained and challenged her in ways that are particularly acute due to her lack of a steady maternal figure.

Sonnenberg’s mother makes only a cameo appearance in She Matters, but it’s a telling one. “My mother always had a main best friend,” Sonnenberg writes, “a passionate, sudden sister who’d last a year, maybe.”

Although the Internet now makes it possible to maintain friendships that might have naturally sloughed off, Sonnenberg, like her mother, has a knack for forcing friendships to their conclusion. Her vivid prose is confessional and precise; she tackles her friendships with the same forcefulness, making a “sudden sister” out of women who often reject her when marriage, children or other obligations claim their time or when they change, no longer welcoming her bawdy conversation. One asks her, “Why are you sitting here, Susanna, telling me this, this, this unattractive story?”

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130111-book-review-she-matters-a-life-in-friendships-by-susanna-sonnenberg.ece

I have been reading a lot of good short story collections lately. I reviewed The Miniature Wife, the debut collection by Austin writer Manuel Gonzales, for the Dallas Morning News. Here’s part of what I said:

The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Manuel Gonzales

(Riverhead, $26.95)

The fantastical is commonplace in The Miniature Wife, the funny and clever debut story collection by Austin-based writer Manuel Gonzales.

A scientist returns from work to find his wife “shrunk to the height of a coffee mug.” A composer talks out of his ears. A narrator reveals that not only has the day-to-day grind of his office job rendered him zombielike, but also that he actually is a zombie, constantly convincing himself not to consume his co-workers’ faces.

In “Pilot, Copilot, Writer,” an airplane circles Dallas for decades, long enough for its pilot to age and die and for a young man who was born on the plane to take over flying. Some of us who’ve been stuck in an endless holding pattern over the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport might be able to speculate about the genesis of this story.

“Life on Capra II” begins with the irresistible line, “Just as we bag that piece of [expletive] swamp monster, the robots attack.” The narrator is trapped in a repeating cycle of annihilating intergalactic beasts that blow his buddy’s head off. He never finds time to romance “the tomato who runs the commissary, a pretty little thing named Becky.”

Although Gonzales is too subtle a storyteller to reveal that the narrator is a figure in a video game, it becomes clear that’s the case, as he repeatedly finds himself set back in places he’s been before, not knowing why he returned, his weapons reloaded and his buddy alive again. “Life on Capra II” asks: What if those muscle-bound gunmen in video games had souls, desires, fears and a creeping suspicion that their memories and experiences were being toyed with?

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130104-review-the-miniature-wife-and-other-stories-by-manuel-gonzales.ece